The Sub-exponential Upper Bound for On-Line Chain Partitioning

The main question in the on-line chain partitioning problem is to determine whether there exists an algorithm that partitions on-line posets of width at most w into polynomial number of chains see Trotter's chapter Partially ordered sets in the Handbook of Combinatorics. So far the best known on-line algorithm of Kierstead used at most (5
^ω
- 1)/4 chains; on the other hand Szemeredi proved that any on-line algorithm requires at least (ω+1/2) chains. These results were obtained in the early eighties and since then no progress in the general case has been done. We provide an on-line algorithm that partitions orders of width ω into at most ω
^{16 log ω}
chains. This yields the first subexponential upper bound for on-line chain partitioning problem.